730137 - REGRESSION: SeaMonkey 2.7 / Thunderbird 10.0 hangs on "Verifying the feed..." for some feeds

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 723469

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[HW]

### Short description

SeaMonkey 2.7 gets stuck when subscribing to the following RSS feed

	   http://static.orf.at/podcast/oe1/oe1_digitalleben.xml

The feed should be valid though because

a) http://validator.w3.org/feed/ says so
b) and it used to work with Seamonkey 2.6.1


The same bug is present on both Linux and Windows and in Thunderbird 10.0 
as well.

This looks similar to 460557, 349504, 606818, 313422, 297569, but the feeds
that could trigger those old bugs work fine.


### Earliest affected versions

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:10.0a2) Gecko/20111214 Firefox/10.0a2 SeaMonkey/2.7a2 ID:20111214013001 (Aurora-Nightly)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:10.0) Gecko/20120129 Firefox/10.0 SeaMonkey/2.7 ID:20120129104549 (Release 2.7)

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0a2) Gecko/20111213 Firefox/10.0a2 SeaMonkey/2.7a2 ID:20111213013001 (Aurora-Nightly)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20120208 Firefox/10.0.1 SeaMonkey/2.7.1 ID:20120208223728 (Release 2.7.1)

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0a2) Gecko/20111214 Thunderbird/10.0a2 ID:20111214030017 (Aurora-Nightly)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20120208 Thunderbird/10.0.1 ID:20120208125353 (Release 10.0.1)


I tried to find the first affected Aurora-Nightly build and stable release
for each of SeaMonkey/Windows, SeaMonkey/Linux and Thunderbird/Linux, that's
why it became such a big list of user agents and build-ids.

Note the subtle difference between platforms: The first build to have the
bug is 2011-12-fourteen-* for Seamonkey/Windows and Thunderbird/Linux and
2011-12-thirteen for Seamonkey/Linux.


### Latest versions that were not affected

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20111221 Firefox/9.0.1 SeaMonkey/2.6.1 ID:20111221001913 (Release 1.6.1)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:10.0a2) Gecko/20111213 Firefox/10.0a2 SeaMonkey/2.7a2 ID:20111213013001 (Aurora-Nightly)

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20111221 Firefox/9.0.1 SeaMonkey/2.6.1 ID:20111221004508 (Release 1.6.1)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0a2) Gecko/20111212 Firefox/10.0a2 SeaMonkey/2.7a2 ID:20111212013001 (Aurora-Nightly)

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.26) Gecko/20120129 Thunderbird/3.1.18 (Release 3.1.18)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:10.0a2) Gecko/20111213 Thunderbird/10.0a2 ID:20111213030019 (Aurora-Nightly)



### Details / How to reproduce 

* Start Thunderbird or SeaMonkey

* In SeaMonkey: Press Ctrl-2 to open the "Mail & Newsgroups"-Window

* If you have no "Blogs & News Feeds"-Account, create one.

* Select the "Blogs & News Feeds"-Account, click on "Manage subscriptions",
  the click on "Add".

* Enter http://static.orf.at/podcast/oe1/oe1_digitalleben.xml as feed url

* Choose to store articles in "Blogs & News Feeds".

* Activate the checkbox "Show the article summary instead of loading the web
  page" or leave it, it seems to make no difference

* In the "Feed Subscription"-window the message "Verifying the feed ..."
  and a progress bar showing 100% will appear. The buttons "Add", "Edit" and
  "Remove" become gray and inactive. The "Feed Subscriptions" will stay like
  this until you close it. (Usually it would display a message about
  downloading news articles and then reactivate those gray buttons.)

* On the Error Console the following messages will appear (in SeaMonkey 2.7):

  - (Warning) use of XMLHttpRequest's progress events' position attribute is
    deprecated
	
	chrome://messenger-newsblog/content/feed-subscriptions.xul

	(appears twice)

  - (Error) s is null

	chrome://messenger-newsblog/content/utils.js Line: 389

  The "s is null"-error seems to be present in all versions of SeaMonkey and
  Thunderbird that share the bug, but the the exact line number or the other
  warnings may vary.

* Close the "Feed Subscriptions" by clicking on the little X in the upper
  right window corner.

* A dialog window will appear with the title "Subscribing to a Feed ..." and
  the message "Are you sure you with to cancel subscribing to the current
  feed?" Clicking "Yes" or "No" doesn't make a difference.

* Afterwards you should find a new folder named like the new feed in the
  "Blogs & Feeds"-Account, but the folder is empty. Click on "Manage
  subscriptions" again and you should see that you are still not subscribed
  to the new feed.

Comment 1

[HW]

Attachment: patch

It seems that this.contentBase is null whenever an item in a feed has no <link> in it, but htmlEscape expects a string as its argument.